Use Power BI to Help Manage Your SharePoint Sites

When it comes to Business Intelligence, SharePoint is most often used as a platform to access dashboards and reports. With the recent availability of the Power BI web part, Power BI joins SQL Server Reporting Services and Excel as a go-to reporting tool within SharePoint.

Occasionally, list data is used as a data source for these reports. This doesn’t work for large amounts of data, but for smaller lists, this is perfectly adequate. Given that Power BI has native connectors for both SharePoint lists and libraries, it is perfectly suited for this sort of task. Combining these two results in some interesting possibilities, as the following article demonstrates.

We work extensively with modern Groups in Office 365. Each group gets its own SharePoint site, and within that, its own OneDrive, or “Shared Documents” library. Depending on the usage of the group, the storage in that library can grow quickly, and it’s not always easy to spot where all the content is being stored. By building a Power BI report that uses the OneDrive as a data source, we can create a report of storage allocation by file and folder, and then show that report on the home page of the SharePoint site.

There are several steps to building this report. It all starts with Power BI Desktop.

Get the Data

To start with, we Launch Power BI Desktop, and Select “Get Data”. Then we select the “SharePoint Folder” file source, and enter the URL of the SharePoint site. Even though we are prompted for the URL of the folder, we must enter the URL of the site itself. The query editor can be used later to filter out any unwanted folders. Only user created document libraries and folders will be returned.

The query will return a number of columns that are irrelevant to this report, and they can be removed. We need to create a column for the URL to the files themselves. The attributes column can be expanded to get the size of any files in bytes. We also use the split function to split the folder path by the “\” delimiter which will allow us to create a folder hierarchy. Finally, we set the appropriate data types on columns, and give them user friendly names.

The scope of this article does not allow for a complete step by step walkthrough of the query editor, but the code below can be pasted into the advanced editor (after replacing the URLs appropriately).

Build the Report

When the Query is complete, we click on the load the data into the model. We don’t need to do a lot of model editing for this report, it’s relatively straightforward. There is only one table, and the Date Created field gives us enough time intelligence that we don’t need to create a date table. There are two edits to the model that I used that bear mention.

One thing that I wanted to show was the accumulation of storage over time. With the size of the file and the create date, I could show the total size that was added for a given day, month or year, but that doesn’t show the accumulation. To do that we need to create a calculated measure, “Cumulative Size”. The formula below calculates a running total of file size based on date:

It’s not strictly necessary, but it’s convenient to create a folder hierarchy by dragging subfolder1 onto Folder, and then dragging in subfolder2 to the bottom of it. That allows all levels of the folder hierarchyto be managed as one.

Finally, we add our visual elements to the report. The report itself can be seen above. In this case, the Size by Folder chart uses the folder hierarchy as the x axis so that clicking on a data bar (while in drill down mode) will open a lower level folder. Marking the data category of the URL field will cause the report to display a clickable URL in any tabular visuals, and setting the “URL icon” property (in the Values section) of the table will display a link icon instead of the long URL. Doing this will allow the user to open any of these files directly from the report. The Growth Rate chart used the Cumulative Size calculated measure created above.

Embed the Report

Once completed, we publish the report into Power BI. It is important to select the correct workspace for this. Since we will be embedding the report into a SharePoint page, it is important to ensure that all viewers will have access to the report. By publishing the report to the same Power BI Workspace that is used by the SharePoint site in question, this will be automatic. In this case, we are reporting against the “Presentations” team site that is associated with the “Presentations” group, so we publish this report to the “Presentations Power BI workspace.

Once published, we need to get the embed URL for SharePoint. This can be determined by opening the report in Power BI, selecting File- Embed in SharePoint Online.

Once we have the URL, we navigate to the SharePoint site and edit the home page (note – the home page needs to be a modern SharePoint page). Once in edit mode we add a new web part, and select the Power BI web part. When prompted, we enter the embed code retrieved above. Once the page is published, all is complete.

Finally, the data source in Power BI will need to be set up to refresh on the frequency required.

With a few simple steps, we have not only gained insights into the storage patterns of our team sites, but we have made those insights available to all members of the site in a highly interactive fashion, without making them open another application.